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What are you reading these days?
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
I just finished Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario, and it was probably the most horrifying read of my life. Based upon dozens of interviews with influential scientists, military officers and personnel involved in nuclear command and control, Jacobsen constructs, minute-by-minute, a scenario in which a nuclear attack occurs against the U.S. and the deterrence house of cards swiftly comes tumbling down. It's both a fascinating and very sobering read as it illuminates the grim realities of nuclear exchanges.
Incredible book. I just finished it myself and now, not only do I want to consume as much information as I can about nuclear weapons, development, and world wars…but I have half a mind to become a prepper…
It's not a book, but the films Threads, The Day After, and When the Wind Blows deal with the run up to and aftermath of nuclear armageddon.
They're all incredibly grim watching but Threads in particular stayed with me for some time afterwards. It's a very haunting film that just gets worse and worse as it progresses, truly horrendous stuff.
Threads is absolutely terrifying, and must be part of a public broadcast once in a while. In this vein, I also recommend Fail Safe to those who have not seen it.
Fail Safe is an absolutely chilling film that gets looked over because it came out the same year as Dr. Strangelove. I think Kubrick even pulled some shenanigans to make sure his film came out first, since their premises are so close. But they are very different in execution.
Miracle Mile is an 80's cult movie that also deserves a spin in your nuclear apocalypse playlist. But Threads is the worst of them. Only watch it if you're feeling too happy one day and need to bring your joy to a screeching halt for some reason.
Thanks for the suggestions! I will have to look into these.
Just finished Joe Abercrombie’s stuff (first law through age of madness), which was amazing, and have started on one dark window which seems interesting so far
I read the first book in The First Law trilogy a few months ago, it was very good! Abercrombie has such a fluid way of describing combat, very visual, and the characters are fantastic, especially Inquisitor Glokta, I was always excited when I got to one of his chapters.
I'm a slow reader though and the books are pretty long so I'm taking a break between the first and second book and reading a few shorter books.
I also just finished Age of Madness and am on to Sharp Ends! I also recently heard rumor that he published (or is intending to publish?) a second set of short stories set in the First Law world. Very exciting, if that's the case!
Do you have any recommendations of other authors/worlds to check out? Preferably something outside the beaten path (I've done the Robert Jordan, Sanderson, GRRM, etc. rounds) and particularly loved The Heroes, if that helps at all. Always excited to "meet" someone else who enjoyed Abercrombie!
Mileage varies, but the general recs I give out are-
Well known series stuff you may have heard of or tried:
The man is a machine at writing and a LOT of his stuff is good, and some great. A variety of series to read. Some common starting points are the first mistborn book, the first stormlight archive book, and warbeaker. If it turns out you haven't read him and enjoy his writing, congrats, he's got a zillion books and puts out several a year, which is nice for someone like me who tends to just burn through someone's works (like i just did with Abercrombie).
Waaay more comedy/satire, but some of my favorite stuff and still very insightful. I highly recommend starting with Mort/Guards Guards/Going Postal or one of his stand alone books like Small gods. His early works (rincewind/witches arcs) are uh....an acquired taste i'd say.
Has two easy to recommend series. Dresden, which is a bit mixed. It starts rough, but it becomes very very good. I love his world building in this series especially. Core idea is basically a modern day wizard detective (even though it's supposed to be a secret) as an excuse to explore all sorts of clever uses of magic/mythology.
The other is Codex alera, which is maybe a bit younger aimed, but still quite interesting, and a more smooth experience. His 3rd series is only 2 books in, and I feel "ok" about it. The first one didn't really wow me and the second got interesting towards the end.
Writer of The Locked Tomb series, starting with Gideon the Ninth. The short sell I heard on this was "Lesbian Space Necromancers" which honestly did not do a lot to sell me on it. So if that does appeal to you, great, you're getting that for sure. If it doesn't, it's actually still very very good, and I'll bet money not what you're expecting. The final book is still being written but might be out this year (people were hoping for last year).
The King Killer Chronicles is basically 2 books and one or two novels and an EVENTUAL 3rd book. There's a lot of controversy about that 3rd book, some of it very much deserved, but suffice it to say it may very well wind up a GRRM situation where it could never come out (although it is supposed to be the last book unlike Song of Ice and Fire which I believe has at least 2 to go?).
That said...it's really really good. I've only read the first two books, not the other stuff, and it's very unique with a lot of interesting ideas and things going on at a bunch of levels. If you can handle the "may never ever get a conclusion" i can't recommend it enough, and if he does release the 3rd book I'm sure it will be MAJOR news, so that's also a good time to dive in I guess.
Although...that said, given the amount of stuff that will need to be wrapped up, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out he needs 4.
House of Leaves. If you can handle horror, there's really nothing else like it. Note, you MUST read it physically. That's not some artsy recommendation, but literally a requirement. It's just not a book you could do as an audiobook.
More horror, but turns out he's pretty good at it. Personally I mostly prefer his short stories because he has this wonderful habit of writing 1/2 of a really good book and then 1/2 of a really cliche ending.
The Black Company. Utterly unique, dark, fantasy that I found because one of my favorite games (Tyranny) took some cues from it. Unreliable narrator style and much more...uh...gritty as the main company/protagonist the book follows are not good people.
The Book of the New Sun series and Soldier of the Mist series being the main two I read. Loves having an unreliable narrator and a BUNCH of layers to what the hell is actually going on. Really nothing like him, but can feel...ambitious to read.
The Expanse series. VERY up and down, to the point that I only finished it because I switched to audio book and could zone out when it got weak, but the highs are high enough I'd still recommend it, and the lows don't seem to bother everyone as much as they did me.
I've only read Perdido Street Station and I am glad I did, but it's also a weird weird weird (and gross) book. Very unique fantasy/steampunk take that feels refreshing thanks to it's unique ideas, but not for everyone.
Less well known stuff:
The Builders. Magnificent Seven meets Redwall. Not trying to be clever, but that's literally the most accurate way to describe it. It's short, NAILS the tone, and actually uses the "these are animals instead of people" thing really really well. Bonus points in that the guy who did the audio book was great.
There is no Antimemetics division. Another horror, and a short story based in the SCP universe. Really unique idea, doesn't totally deliver but I haven't read much else like it, and it's a quick read. I have a few of their other books because I enjoyed it so much and just haven't had time to get to them yet.
Classics(just a list to keep this short):
Catch-22
1984
Of Mice and Men
The Hobbit
Dune
The Count of Monte Cristo
Enders Game
Lots of Lovecraft/Poe
Annnd yeah. That's about all I can recall right now. I've got all my books packed away for a move so I can't just glance at the shelf and see what else is on there, but those are most of the ones that stuck out to me over the years.
Edit-
I forgot, American Gods by Neil Gaiman also makes the list along with Good Omens by him and Pratchett.
Great recommendations but man does it hurt even pulling someone else into the world of Kvothe. Rothfuss and Martin are why I abjectly REFUSE to start an unfinished series no matter how good it is so far.
I get it, but personally, it doesn't bother me.
I've read/watched a lot, and I love unique stories or stories that handle things well. Both of them are masters of it, and if that means that they don't release books often, or maybe never finish, well I can live with it. I've seen many complain that someone like King or Sanderson can Pump out books so why can't they, but at the same time, there's just a MASSIVELY different focus when you compare, and I suspect a lot of that has to do with their writing style being very time consuming (martin has talked about it).
Obviously with Rothfuss there's some concerning OTHER issues in how he's behaved and more specifically the whole charity fiasco, but he'd hardly be the first egotistical perfectionist mess to make a really great work of art.
Edit-
And to demonstrate. Even typing this i'm thinking of ALL THE COOL SHIT Rothfuss packed into two books and how desperately i would LOVE to see him finish and stick the landing. Easy to be conflicted on it.
Thank you so much for this! Many of these I've tried, or at least heard of, but there are a few that are brand new and look really interesting. I'll add them to my list. Much appreciated!!
I tapped out of The Stormlight Archives after Oathbringer. Not because I didn't like the story (or was worried that Sanderson wouldn't finish the books) but because there's so much shit in those books to remember, I would need to give them a second read to really absorb them. And seeing as those fuckers are all a thousand pages plus, I only want to do that once.
So I'll wait until the last Stormlight book comes out this winter and just binge read the series from the start.
Uhhh. Last of this arc to be clear. I believe there’s 9 books planned.
Edit- 10 books
As a fellow Abercrombie fan, I'd like to chime in here. (Concur with just about everything Eji1700 recommended btw, except maybe Sanderson and Butcher)
First off, Abercrombie wrote a lesser known series, starting with Half a King. It's more for a young adult audience, but definitely still fun.
Next I have to mention the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin. For me at least, they were a breath of fresh air in between all the Tolkien-derived fantasy I've grown accustomed too. Nothing wrong with that, but it's just genuinely nice to read a committed series of fantasy that takes its inspiration more from folklore then from Norse epics, but doesn't focus on a young audience. It's wholesome on occasions, deeply melancholy in between, with beautiful prose. I think The Tombs of Atuan is probably one of my favourite books of all time.
(Side-note: if you like Le Guin, read The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed)
Something totally different: The Culture series by Iain M. Banks. It's sci-fi though, the very distant kind. But it shares a grim sort of humour with Abercrombie, and a more anarchist streak throughout.
For some quicker but equally excellent world-building, check out Susanna Clarke. Piranesi is a quick page-turner, and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell is just fantastic.
The Dispossessed for Tildes book club,
Frankenstein,
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Katouh,
The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels which is silly aristocratic pirate fantasy
Oh my goodness there’s a Tildes book club??
Yes! We are reading the Dispossessed by le Guin for around May 15. Project Hail Mary for late June. We just had nominations and voting threads for books after that.
Feel free to join us.
Harrow the Ninth
It's the second installment in the Locked Tomb series. I'm less than halfway through but it's going quite slow - I think I don't quite enjoy it as much as the first in the series, Gideon the Ninth.
Spoilery stuff ahead:
I just got to act 3, and I think I'm just pretty confused about why some chapters that take place in the now has a you-perspective (if that's what it's called?) and those that take place in the past is in third person. I'm also confused about other events that seem to be happening in parallel with the first book, but the events are identical except one of the characters has been switched out which I don't understand. I mean maybe it will be explained later, but for now I'm just confused. So yeah it doesn't quite grab me as much as the first book, so I don't get much reading done. At most about one chapter per day. Hopefully book 3 grabs me more
The Second-Person perspective is explained in an incredibly satisfying way (imo) closer to the end of the book. Well worth pushing through, the third one is really good too.
I had the same reaction. I had to read it a second time when the third one came out so I could get a better handle on it. The rest of them are less confusing and very good IMO.
Book 2 made me like book 1 more, but it's also having the intended effect on you. You will get solid explanations to most of, if not all of, your questions.
I'm currently reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. It's not something I normally would read but I liked Cloud Atlas quite a bit, so I thought I'd give another of Mitchell's books a go. So far I'm digging it.
I'm currently listening to Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards!. It's my first Discworld book. I'm enjoying the audiobook a lot. :)
I've also been reading a memoir of Stany Nyandwi, an early Burundian employee of Jane Goodall back in the 90s. It gives a much more gritty and ground-view of what early chimpanzee conservation looked like, and life in Burundi during the civil war, despite the uplifting title of The Chimpanzee Whisperer. While the "whisperer" title might be overused today, so far it sounds like a truly earned honor as Stany is an amazing human being and a great friend to chimpanzees, as we all should be.
I've also been working through the Forward collection of sci-fi mini-novellas from such authors as Amor Towles, Andy Weir, and N.K. Jemisin. They are free to borrow for Amazon Prime members in both text and audio format (it's the Audible version) and are about 1-2 hour reads each. The Far Reaches collection is the same way.
Just found out that there's new sequels to Dragonlance, so rereading the core books. Finished Chronicles, and currently on the second book of Legends. Which means I have like 10 books to go.
I missed the last thread until it had gone stale, but in the last month:
I finished The Future by Naomi Alderman. This novel went in a lot of unexpected directions, but was thought provoking about the current state of the world in a way that I didn't expect and in a way that was very enjoyable. I recommend this without reservation. It's probably the most interesting book I read in the last year.
After that, I read Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie's collection of short fiction. It was fantastic in all the ways that her work usually is. A good mix of work that deals with interspecies politics like the Imperial Radch books and work that deals with the what-ifs of human relationships with gods who must speak the truth a la The Raven Tower. Very enjoyable, good variety, solid length too.
After that, I was still in a short story mood so I read I'd Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You, and Other Stories by Julianna Baggott. I didn't know much about her or the book going in, so it was a surprise to me to find that some of the stories affected me deeply. She's clearly a person who understands trauma and recovery, and this book explores that alongside the ways technology might affect us. Superficially, there are similarities to things like Black Mirror, but I found her treatment deeper and more insightful. Some of the stories strays into horror, something along the lines of T. Kingfisher. I am definitely going to check out more of her work. Trigger warnings for suicide in the story called "Nest".
All in all, a pretty good streak of wins, which is nice because I felt like I had been in a kind of drought before that.
Have you read Naomi Alderman's The Power too? Thought it was great - how do the two compare?
I have not, but it is on my list now. I will report back in a future thread!
Tag me when you do!!
Haven't had too much time to read for the past month or two, but over the last week I did quite a bit. Finished up To Green Angel Tower, which I enjoyed a lot. My only complaint is that the ending feels a bit rushed, but it's quite understandable that Tad Williams didn't want to make this already lengthy book any longer. Hard to pick a favorite of the trilogy, all three are super enjoyable and I look forward to checking out the sequel series, although will probably hold off a bit on that since I really only like to read one big fantasy series at a time and am itching to explore some other stuff (Looking at you Dune).
Memory Sorrow And Thorn was one of GRRM's big inspirations, which is the reason I read it in the first place, so I decided to go back and finish the Dunk and Egg books. These are a lot of fun, but they still scratch the itch for the worldbuilding that ASOIAF does so well. Dunk is a great character, and it's great to view Westeros through his eyes. My favorite of the three would be The Mystery Knight, love Maynard Plumm and appreciate it expanding on the Blackfyre rebellions.
Also started reading Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. This is a poetry collection in which each poem serves as the epitaph of a different character from the fictional town of Spoon River. I grew up and live in Central Illinois, the region which Spoon River is located in and based on, so there is a bit of a local connection that made me pick it up. Many characters stories overlap with each other, and the subject matter and style varies between poems. I'm not that far into it, but my favorite poem so far is Benjamin Fraser. Would recommend!
I've been reading "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards as I wait for a reMarkable 2 to get to me. I really enjoy the angle it takes, trying to understand creativity in a more analytical way and translate creativity to that analytical mindset. Analytical shit is practically all I ever did; academically I studied philosophy, then neuroscience, then family systems/therapy, and especially thanks to the philosophy always hewed very close to an analytical way of approaching things, picking concepts apart and trying to figure out their full meaning. That...isn't really how it goes when I try to draw, so I wanted to see what I could do to improve and better render what I'm imagining.
There's also some stuff that I feel just doesn't come across the way I want when I try to put it into words. Even when I can find very precise terms, there's an emotional part of it that doesn't come out, that I think images might be able to deliver. I find too, with a lot of folks I know I can't actually get across some of the points I wish to make because they get caught up on the language/arguing specifics with me before I can finish. It's annoying because sometimes the specifics aren't important, and sometimes too the point is complex enough that getting interrupted means I can't recall it completely. Sometimes I don't want to do an argument, I want to do a statement, and I think images are probably gonna be the better way.
I've never taken classes, I've just hung around artists a lot. When I try to tell them about some of these things, pretty much without exception they would tell me they need to be drawings, too. So hopefully I can make that happen. The book does an excellent job of framing things in ways I'm accustomed to, describing things in a kind of detail that just works for me. I remember it better. The tablet gets to me tomorrow so I'm really excited to get started.
the last book for me was Percival Everett’s Erasure, the source for American Fiction.
perfect novel. no notes. i’d definitely recommend going in blind, unless you saw the movie.
edit: the movie is great. there are changes, but the major plot points are identical and the general spirit is the same
I'm reading Discworld: Thief of time.
Death is for sure one of my favorite character in Discworld so I'm almost always happy to read their adventures
Plus I just like Discworld in general, the vibe and wording is just phenomenal.
Though there are a few duds here and there, but considering there are 40 books it's to be expected that they can't all be jewels.
Nearly finished braiding sweetgrass. This book is phenomenal. Absoluloving it.
Also just started shadowplay by Tim Marshall. It's about his time as a journalist during the yugoslav war. Very interesting so far even though I'm about 80 pages in.
I intended to read Neil Gaiman's Stardust as a change from what I usually read, but for some unknown reason I picked up Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Not only is it a depressing book, but its prose is so dense that I end up reading about 5-6 pages a day. The copy I have has very small text too, which doesn't help.
I just finally finished the fourth and last Wayfarer's novel, The Galaxy And The Ground Within. Absolutely beautiful introspective piece of alien/alien interactions. The author (Becky Chambers) really does amazing worldbuilding. While I'm okay with the series being over, I wish more material would pick up the universe she created.
Now onto Displeasure Island by Alice Bell, which just released yesterday. Her second novel after Grave Expectations, a light-hearted whodunin murder mystery from the perspective of a medium. Can't say much about the book yet, but I got... well... grave expectations I suppose. 😜
I'm currently reading Dead and Gone, the twelve book in Andrew Vachss "Burke" series. It's a corny, old, detective/thriller series, but I'm hooked. I'm gonna take the series all the way to the end.
After Dead and Gone, I've got Yellow by extreme horror writer Aron Beauregard. The three books I've read by him are pretty juvenile, but I'm gonna check out another one by him.
Then, after two easy reads, I'm gonna take on Cormac Mccarthy's Cities of the Plain so I can finish off his Border Trilogy. Gonna try and learn how to make homemade tortillas and beans afterwards, because I want to eat them following all of his books.
I just finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and I absolutely loved it. I'm a math nerd at heart and cryptography is what got me into computer science in the first place, so having a book where whole chapters broke down some of the math behind encryption was a joy for me. I got some ribbing from my friends when I said the math sucked me in, but it really did. This was my first Stephenson book, and I'll probably pick up ReaMde (another computer-focused Stephenson novel) in the somewhat near future.
One of my local book club's books for the month (we pick three, you read what you want of those three) is The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu. I'm only in the introductory chapters so I can't talk about it much, but I'm enjoying the sci-fi setting that feels like there's some fantasy hidden under the covers.
Finally, I'm in an online book club that's doing a Silmarillion read-along and discussion. I joined the community for the last Silmarillion club they did in late 2020 and it was enjoyable. I've been wanting to read through it again and take notes this time, so I'm using this club and the discussion as an excuse to do so. For those interested, look up Tea With Tolkien and you'll find the group. Be aware that the book club leader is fairly vocal about her Christian background and a lot of the discussion focuses on how Tolkien's Catholic faith influenced his writing in various ways.